Hanna Höch Exhibition

Check out the London Review Of Books article by Anne Wagner on the Hannah Höch exhibition at the  Whitechapel Gallery in which she suggests that the german artist asked herself the same question she did: “‘What does a woman want?’ I still remember my first encounter with the question Freud put to Marie Bonaparte in 1925, just as I recall my inability to stomach its aggressive and mystifying tone. Years have passed since then, and with them many Hannah Höch exhibitions, yet it has taken the riveting new retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery – her first ever exhibition in London (until 23 March) – to make me realise that Freud’s question was hers too. But for Höch, the ‘woman question’ was above all a social circumstance, something actively shaped by time and place. This is why, as the retrospective demonstrates, her work doesn’t answer Freud’s riddle: instead it cuts right through it, as Alexander did the Gordian knot.”

I’ll unhappily will have to miss the exhibition, but hope that it will travel & that it will eventually come to this country: Höch is one of the major early 20C artists (though she worked steadily on until her death in the late 70s, thus spanning the better half of that century). Her achievement  stands at a par with the much more recognized male dada etc. poets & artists of her circle & generation, such as Tzara or Schwitters, Hausmann or Grosz. Do read the LRB article & check the picture gallery (from which the one reproduced above, called ‘Around a Red Mouth’  & dating from about 1967, is taken.)

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